I'll keep using the photos from those couple of epic days as long as the photogs keep posting them. This is Tyler Larronde in a photo by One More Foto.
Below are the three buoys at 6am.
I put a red line on all of them when the swell was 2f and as you can see it seems that the travelling time was correctly forecasted, but, if one wants to be super precise, they actually weren't.
Those 2f that passed under the NW buoy around 5-6am yesterday got smaller by the time they got to Waimea and Maui. How much smaller we don't know exactly and so we can't exactly measure the travelling time.
But I'm pretty happy to just observe and state that it took 12h for the Maui buoy to get to those same 2f level. Which is actually more useful for our practical means of knowing when and where to go surf.
Just remember that if a NW swell peaks at X feet at the NW buoy, you will never see those same X feet at the Maui buoy, because they are going to be less than that, but you can still use the travelling times table to guess when the swell is going to peak in Maui.
In this particular case, those 2f kept building up to 8.7f 14s at 6am, and we can expect the swell to have a similar rise throughout all day here locally and by sunset time it should be pretty big.
BTW, the original 2f were at 17s and a little bit from a NNW direction (before turning more NW later in the day), so my rule of thumb applied beautifully: 12h at 16s, 16h at 12s. CANNOT BE too precise in these things, a vast margin of approximation has to be considered. Don't book plane tickets based on this stuff...
And also BTW, I looked at Hookipa at sunset and it was tiny. If that was 2f 17s, it was sure very different from the 2f 16s that provided well overhead waves two days ago. I still haven't quite figured out what happened then. I probably never will.
So, swell on the rise all day, but still not big enough to start the contest at Honolua.
Notice also the short period component that will make things look pretty messy and ugly, together with the wind shown in the MC2km map at noon below.
Wind map shows a solid fetch from the storm we've been monitoring in the past few days, that is the one that will send the big weekend swell.
On nov 21st, I posted what the GFS model predicted the same map to be (which I repost below), and you can see it's pretty damn close. When there's a storm that is pretty deep and strong, a 5 days ahead forecast is usually reliable.
PS. Just in case someone was wondering if "forecasted" is the correct past tens of to forecast:
Both forecast and forecasted are widely used as the past tense and past participle of the verb forecast, but the uninflected form is more common. In 21st-century English it prevails by a large margin, but not by such a large margin that anyone should consider forecasted wrong.
I'm old school....
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